Drabbles
by HHHereComesTrouble
Summary: Short, random stories about...well, I'm sure you already know who they're about...
1. Potion

Um, so hello, this is something very different. Caty aka PlayTheGame aka bitchface gave me five prompts, just like I gave her five prompts, and we wrote them out for each other and everyone else to see. These are mine obviously, and just to note, none of these pieces have anything to do with one another. They're all individual stories posted as one story. Yep, think that's all I have to say. Enjoy. :)

* * *

**Potion**

"Oh, ma'am, I am so_, so_ sorry! Let me just clean that off of you right away," the store clerk insisted, the pure and unreserved fright evident in her widened eyes. She scanned the area for a nearby towel, a small cloth, anything that would absorb the liquid from the brunette's cotton sleeve, but nothing of the sort was in view. Heart racing, fingers trembling, the clerk panicked. Beneath them, the tiny, serrated shards of a broken bottle decorated the floor along with a good deal of the unnamed substance itself. But that wasn't what concerned her, not at all. The mess could and would be dealt with, easily. What had her on edge was that the liquid was already soaking through the woman's shirt, seeping into her skin. And what was done could not be undone. All the old clerk could do now was hope for the best and aim to be more cautious the next time she carried a tray of…concoctions across the shop.

"Hey, don't worry about it," Stephanie assured her cordially. "I have plenty of other shirts, okay? No big deal, I promise. But…" Her voice trailed off into silence as her eyes quickly migrated to her watch. "…I actually have to get going now. I have somewhere to be in an hour. Have a nice rest of your day!"

And with that being said, Stephanie left the clerk standing there alone in her paralysis and sauntered to the exit, wholly oblivious to the numerous sets of eyes that latched onto her, drinking her in like a predator does its prey…

"Hi, Da – Vince," Stephanie corrected herself, remembering that this was indeed a work environment, even if the show didn't start for a few hours.

Her father slowly drew his gaze up from the stack of papers in hand, and when he looked at her, he eyed her in a way that was rather…peculiar. She couldn't quite put her finger on the fixed sensation she witnessed in his stare, but she didn't like it one bit and therefore took a vigilant step away from him. Vince, on the other hand, took a shameless step forward, cocked his head to one side, and touched her arm affectionately.

"Stephanie, you look _very_ beautiful today, sweetheart. Did you do something different with your hair?"

She yanked away from his touch at once, dread and uncertainty washing over her simultaneously.

"Dad…I…um…um...are you okay? Are you sure you don't have a fever or something?" she queried. She was really_, really _hoping he had a fever.

But before Vince could answer her question or Stephanie could even reach out to feel his forehead, a soundless, smirking Randy Orton slithered onto the scene, one of his arms dangling at his side and the other positioned strategically behind his back. She flashed him a polite smile, more than grateful for the interruption. In spite of their storyline bad blood from a few years ago, Stephanie and Randy hit it off just fine in real life. They were casually friendly with one another, and her casual friend couldn't have picked a better time to approach her and hopefully strike up a conversation.

"Hey, Randy! How goes it?" she greeted him. Graciously, she extended her hand out in front of herself, but apparently Randy had other ideas in mind, ideas that were far too intimate for her liking. Instead of shaking it like she anticipated him to, he wrapped his arm around her waist in one abrupt motion, pulling her into an extremely awkward embrace and…did he just_ sniff_ her hair? She pulled away instantaneously, much like she did just moments ago with her father. To say that her expression was one of horror was an understatement. Had everyone lost their fucking mind?

"What…what in the world are you doing?" Stephanie all but snapped.

"You didn't like it?" Randy asked, genuinely bewildered. She parted her lips to talk, but the feel of his index finger pressed against them broke her from her train of thought. "Don't speak. Your eyes tell me everything I need to know." From behind his back, he revealed a single, red rose that he was soon holding out for her to accept. She narrowed her eyes at him, then at her father who was too busy ogling at her to pay any attention to his psychotic employee. "A pretty flower for a pretty lady."

"Randal!" And it wasn't Stephanie who shouted at Randy…but CM Punk. Phil Brooks, as the boys in the back sometimes referred to him. She'd once described the man as a scumbag with dirtbag good looks and soulless eyes. And unlike her relationship with Randy, her relationship with Punk was…well, being civil to one another was quite the challenge, you could say.

"I have never been so happy to see you in my entire life," Stephanie admitted to Punk.

"I'd be happy too if it weren't for Randal over here stealing my fucking ideas!" he spat, and Randy merely snickered.

"Stealing…your…oh my God…" Stephanie's jaw dropped in utter disbelief as Punk was now holding out a rose for her also, emulating Randy's gesture to a tee, from the dopey smile plastered on his face to the obsessive, neurotic stare. This _had_ to be a fucking nightmare, and any moment she would stir out of her sleep, and she'd find that she was lying right next to her husband in bed where she belonged…

_Her husband!_

_He_ would know what was going on, he just had to! So in a minute's time, she sprinted to his office, didn't bother knocking, and shut herself inside without giving it a second thought. Men and women both kept sending odd glances her way, and she knew it couldn't be a coincidence.

"PAUL! Everyone's gone mad!" she shrieked, throwing her arms around his neck breathlessly. Perplexed, he wrinkled his forehead, but was happy to see her nonetheless. "Orton...Punk…even my own father! They're all looking at me like some…some fucking piece of meat, Paul! It's mad, I tell you! It's like…like they were put under some spell and…"

Suddenly, in that moment, it was as if all the pieces of the puzzle came together, meshing into one gigantic, nearly unbelievable epiphany. The store. The lady freaking out. The spilled liquid…it was a potion! A fucking _love_ potion, and there was no other explanation.

"You actually do look incredible tonight, if I'm allowed to say so myself," Paul murmured against her temple, and his hot breath tickled her skin and weakened her knees. All thoughts of other men abandoned her, for she found sanctuary in her husband's voice and strong arms. "But then again, you always look incredible, Steph. And the show doesn't start for a few hours, you know. We could always lock ourselves in here until then…where I'll have _all_ of you to myself…"

Love potion or not, she didn't care, not anymore. The spell she had Paul under was far from temporary, and the love he felt for her was there in his eyes and his smile not only today, but every day. Theoretically speaking, the potion didn't affect him because he was already in love with her, and that wasn't changing anytime soon. Gently, she pressed her lips to his, and against them, she whispered, "Lock the door."


	2. Quote

**'I'm coming for you, no matter what it takes.'**

She wandered away from the reception hours ago, hoping to get lost, praying not to be found. She walked without a destination, without purpose, for she was intending to go nowhere. She had nowhere in mind anyways. Yet, here she was, and strangely enough, she wasn't nowhere, but she was in fact somewhere. A place that was all too familiar, but unfathomably awful at the same time, and it made her feel numb just standing there. Comfortably numb. She was so used to the feeling by now, so accustomed to its presence, that she simply learned to live with it and accept the numbness as a fact of life.

A cold gust of wind nipped at her skin, but she hardly felt it, just like she hardly felt the constant ache in her chest, and just like she hardly felt anything for the man she shared a bed with. With that thought in mind, her eyes flickered to the ring she now wore on her left hand, the ring that symbolized a loveless marriage between a lifeless woman and a clueless man. She had only ever been with him to evade loneliness, but months, years passed in a flash, and then one day he proposed, she said yes obviously…and now here she was.

Seemingly out of nowhere, tears began streaming down her cold cheeks, and she dropped to her knees at once, her white gown bunching up around her in the damp grass. Why had this happened to her of all people? She was Stephanie McMahon, and once upon a time, she had her life all figured out. She knew where she was going, she was happy as could be, and most of all, she was in love – really, truly, wholly in love. They were supposed to get married, move into a beautiful house complete with the white picket fence, and then they would have two kids, a boy and a girl. They even had names picked out and everything. Stephanie had loved him with her heart in its entirety, so when fate had tragically stolen him from her, she was left with nothing but a huge, gaping hole in her chest – and unbearable emptiness in her life.

_In Loving Memory Of: _

_Paul Michael Levesque _

_July 27, 1969 – October 2, 2000 _

One last bead of moisture trickled down her face as she ran her fingers over his name engraved in stone. She had literally spent so much time crying that the tears were now refusing to fall. It was almost like her tear ducts had produced all the water they could, and now they were dried up and useless, much like her ribs. What was the point of protecting a heart that was already shattered? Maybe not being able to cry anymore was for the better though. She knew she had to pull it together, and people kept telling her to stay strong, but how could she when nothing was getting better? She spent every waking moment of her life grieving, thinking of all the things she could have done to stop Paul from enlisting in the army, all the ways she could have convinced him to stay with her where nothing would hurt him. Perhaps he would still be here now if those thoughts had crossed her mind at the time.

"I miss you so much," Stephanie whispered, hoping that some way, somehow he could hear her, wherever he was. "I might be married now, but my heart will always belong to you. You're my best friend, Paul, and I love you more than you could ever know. I know that you would want me to be happy, because you were always so good to me like that, but…" Her voice cracked, and she took a moment to regain her composure. "…but it's just so hard, baby. It's so hard to wake up in the morning and pretend everything's okay, because all I ever think about is you. I keep waiting for you to come home, because in my head I always hear those last words you said to me when we were talking on the phone that one night: 'I'm coming for you, no matter what it takes.' That promise was what got me through those long, dark, lonely nights. But you never came, Paul, and I think it's time for me to face the fact that you're not coming…you're never going to come."

She was now leaning against the headstone, her eyes shut tightly because it made her feel close to him. She remained there all night, through the rain, through the thunder, through the lightning, through all the things that generally scared the shit out of her, and she prayed. She prayed to be with Paul, because a life without him was not a life worth living. She would go to him, no matter what it took. She would keep the promise he had not intended to break. And the last thing she was remotely conscious of was the world around her fading to black for the final time.

The next thing she saw was his face, which made her smile, and he was smiling back at her.


	3. Fanfiction

**Fanfiction**

Stephanie really knew it was for the best that she stay off the internet, or at least that's the ideology she always tried to live by, but sometimes she just couldn't contain her curiosity. Sometimes it tickled her funny bone to casually read what wrestling "smarks" were saying about not only her, but her entire family, on the latest message boards and rumor sites. So every now and then, when the kids were fast asleep, when she was finished working out, when boredom seemingly struck her at full force, she would key her name into the Google search bar just to see what would come up. Just for kicks. More times than not, this resulted in rib-aching laughter, and that was always welcomed after a long, taxing day at the office. On the rare occasion, she would come across something genuinely nice about herself (that didn't involve her…assets), but mostly people used the anonymity of the internet to their advantage and bashed the work she and her husband did for the company.

But what she innocently stumbled upon tonight was nothing of the sort. It wasn't even close. This website was not at all akin to the previous sites and forums she'd visited in the past. This thing, it was called fanfiction. "Unleash your imagination," it read at the top, and that should've been a dead giveaway to turn back now, to not delve any further into this thing, because a large sum of their fans possessed…unique imaginations, and that was the nice way of putting it. Currently, she was viewing the wrestling archive page, and the first thing to catch her eye was a drop-down menu that would filter these...fanfictions by character. So of course, she selected her name, clicked go, held her breath, cringed a little, and waited for the next page to load.

"Oh shit," she whispered to herself in part amusement, part disbelief. The fact that there were hundreds of stories about her in existence was something that took a minute to sink in. Her eyes scanned the screen, and she instantly saw terms she was unfamiliar with, not that she had any reason to be familiar with this peculiar lingo. AU, drabble, slash, smut…smut? What in the fucking world was smut? She clicked on one of the links that contained the mystifying word in its summary, and it really only took her two seconds, if even, to find out for herself what smut was.

"What are you doing, Steph?" Paul laughed as he climbed into bed next to her. "You look like you've seen or ghost or something."

"Worse," Stephanie replied. Her eyes drifted to his, then back to the screen. "People write…they write…about…about…us…and…" she stammered before sighing and eventually just sliding the laptop over to her husband. "See for yourself."

Paul kept his gaze fixated on her for a moment longer and reluctantly did as she instructed. He mumbled a majority of the words incoherently under his breath before reaching a one, specific line which he read aloud with narrowed eyes.

"…feel of his thumb pressing down on her…swollen flesh, what the fuck am I reading?"

"I TOLD YOU!" she shouted, flailing her arms above her head theatrically. "People are writing porn about us on the internet, Paul! PORN!"

"You know…" he started, returning the computer to her. "This is actually kind of good…and hot. I like it. Find more."

Stephanie merely glared at him.

"You're a pig," she told him, even as she obeyed his command, returning to the previous page and scrolling through the stories listed. "Which one do I click on?"

Paul shrugged, adjusting himself in the pillows. "Are there summaries? Read me some of them."

"Okay. Hmmm, this one's about us having a fourth kid, a boy." She sent him a stern, knowing look before he had the chance to speak up. "Don't get any ideas, honey. This one's about us going against my father's wishes and getting together anyways…sounds terribly familiar…Oh! This one's about you cheating on me, you jerk!"

A slight wince filled the otherwise quiet bedroom as she violently smacked his arm.

"Hey! What the hell was that for? I didn't write that!"

That excuse earned him an eye roll.

"Since I can't smack fictional Triple H, I'll just have to settle for the real one," she chirped. "Oh, and how appropriate that this next one listed is about you dying! I guess that's what you get for sleeping with a slut behind my back. Karma's a bitch."

"Karma ain't the only one," he muttered under his breath, still rubbing at the area she swatted.

"What was that?"

"Nothing, honey."

"That's what I thought," she retorted, shutting the laptop and setting it on the bedside table. "I think that's enough fanfiction for one ni – I mean, lifetime. But you know, that one story did give me a few ideas, and I was thinking maybe we could reenact a little bit of it."

"The one where I fucking die?" Paul queried, horrified. He looked to be on the verge of making a mad dash out the door at any given moment. "I think I'll pass."

"No, silly, the first one we read, the one that you actually liked."

"Oh, that one," he confirmed, wiggling his eyebrows approvingly as he pulled her onto his lap so that she was now straddling him. He pressed his mouth against hers, sucking her bottom lip, but only for a short second before pulling away. "And just for the record, you're the only slut I sleep with."

"Don't push it, Levesque," Stephanie warned, gladly picking up where he left off.


	4. Titanic

**Titanic**

Down, that's where she was looking. Vast swells of the ocean, that's what she saw. The freezing night air, that's what she felt against her showing skin. The deafening roar of the boat's engine, the roar of the water below, that's what she heard. Fear, reluctance, uncertainty, that's what she felt in her mind. Death, that was her impending fate. Do it now, that was her very last thought. Or at least it should have been.

"Don't do it."

The voice startled her, made her jump out of her skin a little, for she hadn't noticed anyone else on the top deck, and she hadn't expected anyone to even be up here at this late hour. Gripping the rails of the ship even tighter than before, she turned and maneuvered her head until the source of the voice was in view. A man was standing there, that was all. Just a man with long blonde hair dressed in beige, tattered clothing, and she had to admit he was fairly handsome – not traditionally handsome, but handsome to her nonetheless. But he was also a man preventing her from getting this over with, and therefore, he was an annoying man.

"Stay back!" she told him. "Go away!"

"Here, take my hand," he instructed, ignoring her entirely as he took a step forward. "I'll help you back over, come on."

"I don't want or need your help, thank you very much!" she snapped, and he merely stood there, stood there with that disbelieving, dumbstruck look on his face. She'd left him speechless, and truthfully that was a good thing because every time he opened his mouth, irritation washed over and consumed her even more. "I'm going to jump now," she said to him.

The man shook his head.

"No you won't." And he was so close to her that for the first time, she could really, truly get a good look at his face, his eyes specifically, under the faint moonlight. They were hazel, she decided, and underneath the snarky, she saw something else in his gaze. She saw genuine concern, and that frightened her to no end. This man – this stranger was looking at her not as if she were some crazy woman he was obligated to save, but as if she were a friend, a lover, someone that he wanted to save.

Still, she resisted his aid.

"Look, don't tell me what I will or won't do. I'm going to jump," she reiterated adamantly. "Now get away from me!"

"Are you now? Are you really going to jump?" he questioned her, raising his brows inquisitively. Then…then he started… he started…laughing. Laughing at her! _Laughing_. Here she was on the verge of taking her own life, and this man she didn't even know was laughing at her! She felt her face grow indescribably hot and subsequently clutched the rails a little tighter.

"May I ask what's so amusing to you, sir?"

"It's just that…" His voice trailed off into silence as he removed his coat, then began removing his shoes, and now she was the one looking at him utterly dumbstruck. "…if you jump, I'll have to jump in after you…to save you, of course."

"You're crazy."

"I'm the crazy one?" he chuckled, and she stayed silent because…well, because he kind of had a point there. "Listen here, Princess, let me break this down for you. I know that I can swim, I don't know if you can swim, but I also know that the freezing water will kill us both and it doesn't really matter whether or not we're good swimmers. So either both of us live or both of us die. Your call, Princess."

She burned a hole through him with her piercing, blue eyes before eventually just giving in and taking his hand. "You will _not_ call me Princess," she clarified.

But as she was holding onto him, as she was turning around so she could climb back over the rail, as she was putting her life in this man's possession, she slipped. One misguided step, that was all it took. One wrong step and now she was actually dangling over the edge of the boat, holding onto his hand for dear life because that was the only thing separating her from death. Maybe a few moments ago, in those few moments that she was stupid and foolish, maybe then she longed to die. But now she didn't. Now she wanted to live. She was still so young, and she had her whole life ahead of her to live, to enjoy. And if this stranger, this man who knew nothing about her, saw the value in her life, then she should, too.

"Don't let me fall!" she cried out to him.

"I won't! I'm not letting go," he told her. She trusted him. "Try and pull yourself up!"

She wasn't sure how she did it, how she mustered the strength, the will, the persistence, any of that, but she did. Somehow she did, and now she was in his arms, and the rail was the only thing lodged between their bodies, and for once she felt safe. His touch made her feel safe.

"Paul Levesque," he said breathlessly, smiling at her.

"Stephanie McMahon."

And that right there was how they met, late at night, on the Ship of Dreams, their two worlds from opposing ends of the spectrum colliding as one.

But that was only the beginning of the end for Paul, Stephanie, their forbidden love, and well...for everyone on board.


	5. Ghost of Christmas Present

**Ghost of Christmas Present**

Christmas Eve, 2000

You weren't supposed to spend Christmas Day all by yourself. That wasn't how it worked. It was a day where you were supposed to be surrounded by your loved ones – your family, your closest friends, even those relatives you didn't love so much that sort of invited themselves over anyways. And every year she'd spent Christmas that way exactly, catching up with people she hadn't seen since the Christmas prior, so it made her heart sink a little that this year that trend would be broken. This year Stephanie had nobody, and when she said nobody, she legitimately meant nobody, not a single soul. Her family members, they were just all so busy right now, and to be truthful, she couldn't tell you where any of them were at this moment, or what they were even doing. Sure they'd sent cards and all, while some even sent money…not that she was lacking in that department.

It made her feel forgotten, irrelevant, unimportant, like her family didn't really care whether or not she was alone for the holidays, and who knew, maybe they didn't.

But above all else, she felt sad.

Tomorrow was Christmas, she was sitting by her bedroom window watching the snow descend gently from the sky, and all she really wanted to do was curl up in a ball and cry. All she longed for was for someone –anyone to show up on her doorstep, not with beautifully wrapped gifts, not with a mug of hot chocolate, just their regular old self, and that would be plenty enough for her. She was desperate for company, so desperate that she was actually contemplating seeing what the neighbors were up to this evening.

"Bad day, huh?"

Stephanie jolted her head around instantaneously, matching the strange voice she'd just heard to an even stranger face.

"Wha…how…where…how did you get in here?" she stammered out, backing away slowly from the short, corpulent man. At least…she had presumed he was a man, but as she studied him further, his features started to closely resemble those of a phantom-like creature rather than a man, as preposterous as that may have sounded. Maybe she was delirious. It was all the red wine she'd consumed earlier on. Yes, it had to be.

"Don't be alarmed, miss," the man said, and what a foolish thing that was to say. A man…phantom…thing had broken into her house! How could she not be alarmed? Of course she was fucking alarmed and about two seconds away from calling the goddamn police. "Maybe if I introduce myself you'll understand." Silence was an evident cue for the man to continue. "I am the Ghost of Christmas Present, and I'm sure you've heard the tale and all, so you already know that I'm about to show you how the people in your life are spending Christmas Eve."

"I don't care how they're spending Christmas Eve," Stephanie spat. She had ultimately given up on trying to get this strange man out of her house and decided she sort of liked his company, even if she was delirious and seeing things that were not actual things at all. "They obviously don't care how I'm spending tonight, so why should I give two fucks about them?"

"Well, that's not really how this is supposed to work. I'm actually supposed to take you…"

"You won't be taking me anywhere," she corrected him, not even allowing him to finish his statement.

"There's not anyone you want to see? Not even for a few moments?"

Well…

Maybe there was one person she wanted to see, for only a few moments. Yes. Just to check in on him of course. Because it was sort of stormy around these parts of the country. And it felt wrong to not check in on him, you know, just to make sure he was safe and all. Like, so what if he was the cause of her broken heart and the reason she sort of despised her father? So what if things between them were tremendously awkward at this point? So what if they didn't speak to each other outside of work, and so what if they couldn't look each other in the eyes without feeling a little broken, a little shattered? So what. None of that mattered. She may not have known a lot of things about life, because she was really young, and she was still learning how life itself worked, but what she did know was that tonight she wanted to see him. For a few moments.

"Paul Levesque," Stephanie finally stated, and it felt like it had been forever since she'd said his full name to anyone other than her bathroom mirror.

The man simply smiled, nodded, did whatever magic there was to do, and in that next moment, she was standing outside in the snow.

Stephanie was standing outside in the snow…in front of her own house.

Naturally, she turned to face the man so she could ask him what the hell his problem was, what kind of trick he was playing on her, but when she turned to face where he'd been standing, he was nowhere to be found. He had disappeared without a trace, seemingly vanished into thin air.

So her Christmas Eve had turned from bad to worse. Not only was she standing out in the freezing cold without a coat, but it all of a sudden dawned on her that she was also locked outside of her own house with no way back in. Marvelous.

"Stephanie?"

Upon hearing her name, she spun on her heel automatically, knowing that voice all too well, but also knowing that this was too good to be true, that it was some dream, some figment of her imagination. But…it wasn't. Standing merely feet away from her, there he was. There he was, flashing her that cheeky grin that she missed seeing on him, and he was holding flowers. Red flowers, because he knew she liked them best.

"Paul!" she yelled, darting towards him at once. She virtually leaped into his waiting arms, kissed him hard, kissed him like it was the last kiss they would ever share, and silently thanked the Ghost of Christmas Present for the greatest gift she could fathom.


End file.
